A GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING..

She is, in many ways, an old-fashioned person, a woman who longs for a traditional, intact family around the table and sees herself as a mother first and foremost.

She says of her husband ,“He’s a gifted man, but in the end, he’s just a man”.

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In every speech, she makes, it's clear that her husband’s political career has meant considerable sacrifice for her own family, and talks about how hard it is for her, personally, to find equilibrium. In one little-noticed admission to an interviewer, Michelle Obama estimated that over the past year, her husband had been home with free time for a paltry total of 10 days.

That means 355 days in which Barack Obama was not home with free time, and it was Michelle who had to get up and get the girls ready for school and get through the day, somehow, herself, and try to preserve some semblance of a career and a life. She is not a martyr who endures this kind of thing silently.

Today, she tells an anecdote about how the four of them — Michelle, Barack, Sasha, and Malia — travelled together recently, and “at one point someone asked Malia, our older daughter, what she enjoyed most about the weekend, and she said, ‘Being with my dad.’ “And,” she says, “it nearly broke my heart.”

The ‘boss’ behind President Obama Obama’s road to the White House was a whirlwind of a political life, the sort that rips marriages apart. For 10 out of 365 days, dad wasn’t at home, and it was Mum who had to get up and get the girls ready for school... and get through the day, somehow, herself.

Luckily, even in the struggle to preserve some semblance of a career and a life, she appreciated the value of sacrifice. give her husband the go-ahead to run. She feels that all children, not just hers, deserve “the resources they need to ensure a healthy future.” Michelle’s most important role is explaining Barack Obama.

She does this beautifully. It is her crucial task to humanise him, to make sense of him—to normalise him. “Who is Barack Obama the man, the father?” she said in Nashua, New Hampshire, during the primary campaign. “What is his character? What are his values?” It is the traditional duty of the political wife, of course, to reinforce her husband’s virtues, channelling the audience’s admiration through what has become known as the Adoring Gaze.

But Michelle Obama’s task is different, because Obama has such a complicated personal back-story. She often acknowledges to audiences that when she first heard about him, she assumed he would be strange. He is a bi-racial man, technically, who identifies himself, as he writes in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, as “a black American” and “a black man with a funny name.”
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She has a quick and wicked sense of humour. Sought assurance Before agreeing to her husband’s presidential run, she insisted upon — and got — a series of meetings with his closest advisers, during which she sought assurance that the campaign was plausible and that it would be well run.

She is said, by those who know her, to be as smart as her husband. Some say she is smarter. Unlike her husband, who in his early 20s spent a great deal of time by himself, reading, she seems more of a doer, an extrovert, a list maker, not ruminative. She does not like to cook. She is almost heroically well organised. She is a better boss than an employee; she likes to be in charge and does not like her time to be wasted. She is forceful and can be intimidating.

Her husband says she is “a little meaner than I am.” Her brother says even family members are scared of her. He may or may not be joking. She is the person her husband trusts to be his radar about people; she is seen as more sceptical than he is. He calls her “the boss.”
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This Saturday article was a challenge.Ask yourself will you be that gift that keeps on giving?